How to Make Basic Roasted Butternut Squash

Once you know how to make basic roasted butternut squash, you can spice it up almost any way you want—sprinkle it with rosemary and lemon zest, toss in some caramelized shallots, or sprinkle with toasted pine nuts.

Hi, I'm Miranda with recipe.com, and today, I'm gonna show how to make basic roasted butternut squash. So, this is such a tasty, tasty side dish and if you're used to cooking with potatoes, considering mixing it up a little bit with the bright and colorful butternut squash. So, we've our ingredients all laid up here. We have 1 pound of peeled and chopped butternut squash and into this nice little like 3/4 of an inch to an inch cube. Now, I purchased mine already pre peeled and cubed, but it's just easy and saves a little bit of time, but if you're doing it at home, all you'll need to do I just peel it with a vegetable peeler. You'll cut it in half, lengthwise, scoop out those seeds, and then chop it on up, but you wanna skip that part and save a little time, you do as I did and just buy the pre cubed. Then we also have just a little squeeze of lemon juice that's optional in this recipe and also just a little dash of pepper. We have half of the teaspoon of the kosher salt, and you can increase that to taste if you want, and then we have 2 to 3 tablespoons of olive oil. I started with 2. We just want to give it a nice coat here because we don't want it to dry out. If we have to add a little bit more, we can certainly do that. Here I have a lovely little baking sheet lined with parchment paper. My oven is preheated behind me at 475 degrees. So what I'm gonna start to do is combine our cubed butternut squash here in this medium sized bowl, just drizzle in olive oil, and again we just wanted enough to coat so you don't have to use to 2 tablespoons, don't, and at least just check it out and see how it's doing, looks good, and because the butternut squash is always a little bit wet you'll notice that especially when you're peeling it will go a little bit slippery, almost like sweat that's kind of how it feels, it will obviously look glistening, so you may wanna use a little bit more olive oil, I mean, like on the safe side just to make sure that it's getting nice and olive oily good, put in our salt, our lemon juice, and our pepper. Cut out the pepper, and just give another little toss here in this bowl and if you find that your vegetables you're using and they dry out, you can always drizzle them with a little bit of olive oil at the end and sort pretty sound like [unk]. You don't have to be stuck with dry vegetables. Don't you worry about that. Alright, let's pop it on our parchment lined sheet here, and we're just gonna evenly spread this out. You want everything to be able to evenly cooked. If it's all piled like this, Our little guys in the middle will gonna have a harder time. If want them to get kind of golden brown roasted, you really wanted to spread it out for easy roasting. How's a quick note. The rack in the oven I've moved it right in the center. So you want it to be in the center when you're roasting, so everything can cook nicely and easily. Okay, I'm gonna pop it in, and I'm gonna cook it for 15 minutes on this one side, then I'm gonna go in there and kind of flip them all over, and then cook for an additional 10 to 15 minutes until nice and tender and a little bit crispy, so we'll come back then. Okay, so my butter squash is roasted for 20 minutes, look how gorgeous it is. It's still like nice and soft on the inside, but we have that like crunchy golden brown yumminess on the outside. This is the part now remember that lemon juice is optional. If you want it added in, which I think will give it a nice little zing. We're just gonna drizzle on top now, just a little drizzle, and then I know we already put some salt and pepper in, but we're gonna do a little bit more to taste. So, you know, if really like salt, you might wanna do a little bit more. If you don't, you can leave it out. It's always a thing, you know, when doing you need to taste it to your taste and just remember it's a lot easy to add more in, but you can't really take any out. So just sort of consider that. We're gonna have it one nice little toss, and if you wanted to like adjust this up a little bit, you can toss it now in some, you know, sort of like flavored butter, like a melter butter on top and a flavored sea salt. You could eat it as is in a side dish, put some pasta. There are so many things you can do. Just so simple to make, nutritious, absolutely delicious, tons and tons of uses, that's how you make basic roasted butternut squash. Thanks for watching and for more great recipes and savings, visit us at recipe.com.